Mr. Sophal is a scholar under the Southeast Asian Upland Agriculture Fellowship, a project under the auspices of the Southeast Asian Center for Graduate Study and Research in Agriculture (SEARCA) and the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) of Canada, and is taking his Master of Science degree in Agronomy at the University of the Philippines Los Baños (UPLB). He presented a paper based on his thesis research entitled “Evaluation of seed quality of some upland rice farmers in Ratanakiri Province, Cambodia.”

Through his research, Mr. Sophal, an assistant lecturer at the Royal University of Agriculture in Cambodia, hopes "to provide farmers technology-based production options that could potentially improve their current yield and income levels."

Organized by the Faculty of Agriculture of Chiang Mai University, the three-day international conference was attended by over 150 participants from 16 countries and was cosponsored by SEARCA, IDRC, the University of Hohenheim, and the Thai Royal Project Foundation.